Dick Cheney: closing Guantanamo makes terror attack more likely

Dick Cheney, the former US vice president, has claimed that Barack Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo prison will make another major terrorist attack more likely.

Dick Cheney said that the previous administration's anti-terror apparatus had prevented another incident on a par with the September 11, 2001, attacksPhoto: AP

By Our Foreign Staff

5:46PM GMT 04 Feb 2009

In a staunch defence of the controversial tactics of the Bush administration, he also said that the decision by the new US President to abandon "enhanced" interrogation techniques was also a mistake.

An unrepentant Mr Cheney said that the previous administration's anti-terror apparatus had prevented another incident on a par with the September 11, 2001, attacks.

"If it hadn't been for what we did - with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth - then we would have been attacked again," he told Politico. "Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the US."

He viewed the risk of a dirty bomb attack as high. The "ultimate threat to the country", was a "9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter - a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind" that is deployed in the middle of an American city that could kill perhaps hundreds of thousands of people.

Mr Cheney left office with an historically low approval rating of 13 per cent. He was identified with the most contentious aspects of the war on terror which critics said subverted justice and badly tarnished America's reputation overseas.

Although he did not personally criticise the new president, he said that the announcement on the first full day of his presidency that he wanted Guantanamo closed within a year would lead to criminals intent on harming the US being freed.

"If you release the hard-core al-Qaeda terrorists that are held at Guantanamo, I think they go back into the business of trying to kill more Americans and mount further mass-casualty attacks," he said. "If you turn 'em loose and they go kill more Americans, who's responsible for that?

"When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an al-Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry," he added.

Protecting the country is "a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business," he said. "These are evil people. And we're not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek."